How Works Works

Like many readers of Édouard Levé, I first came to his books when Dalkey Archive published English translations of Autoportrait (2002) and Suicide (2008) several years ago. But while Suicide was arguably the title that received the most attention from critics — in no small part because Levé actually committed suicide ten days after delivering the manuscript to his publisher — I was more taken with Autoportrait for reasons best articulated by Mark O’Connell at Slate:

To describe that book in basic terms is to risk making it sound outright unreadable. It’s a single paragraph, 112 pages long, consisting of a continuous sequence of short declarative sentences, each of which states some or other fact about its author, a relentlessly present “I”. … It’s grueling and madly propulsive at the same time; you kind of want him to stop just saying things about himself, but you also can’t stop reading these things that he just keeps saying. “My uncle’s friend taught me to laugh at things I saw on TV that were not, on the face of it, funny, for example Bobby Ewing’s hairstyle on Dallas,” he writes. “I have not signed a manifesto. If I turn around while looking in the mirror, there comes a moment when I no longer see myself. Raymond Poulidor is one of the least sexy names I know. I like salad mainly for the crunch and the vinaigrette.” It goes on like this, in this arbitrarily funny and boring and horrifying way. The more it goes on, the more facts he asserts about himself, the more the referent — the autobiographical subject, Levé himself — is displaced, defined into obscurity.

“I was as transfixed by the book’s self-possessed commitment to its formal conceit as I was by its blank and pitiless gaze on the reality of pain… [its] strange combination of formal distance and emotional immediacy,” O’Connell writes of Autoportrait — although he writes those words in his review of Levé’s latest posthumous publication, Works, in order to identify the governing aesthetic of Levé’s entire oeuvre. “[T]his is the signature of Levé’s pulverized non-narratives,” he says, “this unflappable insistence on going on like this. He’s never afraid, in other words, of being boring in the service of some larger way of being interesting.”

I agree with that, and I also broadly agree with O’Connell’s assessment of Works. “Works is one of the most nakedly formalistic pieces of writing I’ve ever come across,” he writes:

The book as a whole is usefully encapsulated in its opening sentence, which is the first of 533 descriptions of ideas for artistic projects: “1. A book describes works that the author has conceived but not brought into being.” This is precisely what the book is, except for the obvious distinction that this particular oddball project has been brought into being, as evidenced by the fact that you are now reading it, or are at any rate about to try to read it. For the most part, it’s a catalogue of unrealized creativity, which in the very extensiveness of its cataloging becomes a monstrous paradox of realized creativity. … For a work of such rigorous formal experimentalism, Works can be surprisingly funny. I found myself laughing out loud, here and there, at Levé’s poker-faced batshittery. …It is, let me reiterate, a book consisting solely of descriptions of imaginary works of conceptual art. As with all of Levé’s work, his insistence on continuing doing the one specific thing he’s doing is an ongoing source of weird perplexity for the reader, a weird perplexity that is a key aspect of the experience of reading him.

What I find most captivating about Works, however, are those moments when Levé ruptures his own relentless accumulation of descriptions of conceptual works in alternative artforms and instead casts his readers directly into the abyss of literature. Every so often, Levé punctuates his catalogue of descriptions with a description of an artwork that possesses certain qualities which could not possibly be perceptible to anyone who might actually behold it, so that the work in question is ultimately and irreducibly literary in nature as the qualities by which it is defined and constituted are inextricably bound to the page. Consider, for example, artwork number eighty-six, which is described in its entirety as follows: “A painting is painted with the artist whispering, ‘Bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye…'” The painting is the artwork, but the quality that defines and constitutes it as this painting and no other is a quality that cannot ever be observed by anyone other than Levé’s narratorial consciousness. The same is true of later artworks, such as number one hundred and twenty-four:

A pamphlet displays twenty-four photographs taken by an artist on a walk through the city, starting from his home. He chooses a metro stop at random. He takes the first exit. Once outside, he takes the second street on the left, the third on the right, again the second on the left, again the third on the right, and so on. If there are fewer than two or three streets, he takes the first possible turn. Every five minutes, he takes a photograph of what’s right in front of him. The walk lasts for two hours.

Since so much of the artistry of this artwork — so much of the artist’s exploitation of the particularities of his or her chosen artform — is invested in Levé’s description of the process of composition, and since so little of it is invested in the outcome of that process, the real value of the artwork resides not in the work itself but in Levé’s literary rendition of its coming into being. It is true that most of the artworks described in Works are not artworks of this sort. Most of them are works that could conceivably be brought forth in a way that does not compromise their artistic integrity. But every so often throughout Works, Levé describes something that is either imbued with aesthetic particularities or else productive of affective states that can exist only in a descriptive form, that are almost entirely constructions of language alone, and that therefore cannot escape or transcend the written word —

138. A wild animal is painted on a red background, in the middle of a round tableau, the radius of which is proportional to the distance at which the animal will choose to fight or take flight when approached by something dangerous.

264. An artist sells his works at the average price paid over the last year for works in the same medium by living artists of the same nationality.

297. A golden drill engraves a sausage.

312. The track of a giant slug — a fat and transparent viscous line — runs through an exhibition, thickening at those works before which the creature tarries.

341. Advertising photographs are reconstructed using expressionless models. The absence of slogans makes the message incomprehensible.

348. A political lobbying group aims to have zoo animals paid a monthly salary.

438. A surgeon creates invisible tattoos on the walls of internal organs.

— and it is with these sorts of descriptions that Levé invests the value of Works itself in its own literariness, in its exploitation of the aesthetic particularities of the artform of literature above any and all alternative forms.